Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing Possible head space issue

What we don't know is how many shots/years ago this rifle started exhibiting headspace issues. If the OP isn't the long term owner and has only fired it sporadically over the last couple years, we don't know if the condition came on slowly or all at once. If it came on all at once, it would be cause for alarm as the steel in the Krag bolt and receiver is very low carbon stuff and only case hardened for wear protection. As such, a sudden display of excess headspace could indicate a cracked bolt lug (they only have one, plus a safety lug). Absent that (look closely at it), and headspace is a little on the long side, I would start with virgin brass and follow gemby's advice and set it up so as to headspace off the shoulder and let the rim fall where it may, back against the bolt face preferrably.

That's not the perfect answer as brass life will still suffer a bit, but is a lot safer. At any rate, definitely have the headspace checked. It could be nothing more than somebody having swapped a different bolt into it somewhere along the line.

Another potential source of problems with the Krag is when people lap the lug/seat so as to bring the safety lug to bear against steel to give a two-lug locking system. That trick invariably wears through the skin of surface hardness of both the locking lug and seat, exposing the soft steel underneath which in turn greatly speeds up lug set-back/cracking.

We also don't know how hot the handloads are. Krags are rated at 40,000# and a diet of stuff even a little hotter than that will cause lug set back/cracking or case stretching/seperations at least. The original gov't load was a 220 grain bullet at 2000fps. When they upped it to 2200fps around the turn of the last century they started getting complaints from the field of those very things happening, so they dropped it back to 2000 fps and kept it there. The quest for higher velocity resulted in a new design rifle with hotter ammo- the 1903 Springfield. Remember these wonderful rifles are all 112 to 123 years old now. They will keep going another hundred years if we mind what we shove up the spouts in them.

Krags are surprisingly robust, given their limitations. Even in the event of lug failure, there isn't much chance of the bolt blowing back out of the receiver. Michael Petrov once conducted a destruction test of a Krag using cartridges loaded with insane amounts of Bullseye powder, and got up to wild pressure levels before the action shattered and bolt went flying- all done with the locking lug ground off entirely, relying solely upon the safety lug for lockup.